As is well known, such features as faces, voice, hand shapes, iris, veins, fingerprints, etc., are now utilized for personal authentication in biometric authentication systems, and studies on the individual features have been actively conducted.
Many face-recognition devices (or terminals) based on face recognition of these biometric authentication technologies are increasingly used due to ease of use and fast authentication speed.
Nevertheless, it is required for biometric authentication apparatus not only to have excellent authentication performance with a low FAR (False Acceptance Rate) but also to secure hardware reliability and robustness in order for the use of public.
In case where a biometric authentication apparatus is employed in constructing an access control system, increased loads due to frequent access of the users may lead to heat generation and power consumption of the access control system and thus may result in hardware damage owing to the heat generation. In particular, if the biometric authentication apparatus is based on face recognition, it requires a lot of resources to conduct an image analysis and processing. Thus, such a biometric authentication apparatus may be apt to be significantly sensitive to the heat generation in comparison with other biometric authentication apparatus based on fingerprint recognition.
As countermeasures against the heat generation in the biometric authentication apparatus based on face recognition, a dedicated processor undertakes tasks to detect and authenticate a face area of a subject from image information acquired from the subject, and a core processor undertakes the operations such as access control and time attendance other than the authentication task.
However, the process to conduct the detection and authentication of a face area still requires a complicated processing unlike other operations. Although the dedicated processor is employed in the biometric authentication apparatus, such problems as the heat generation and power consumption still remain in the biometric authentication apparatus.